Living Witness(15)

“My mama says you don’t belong here, either,” Barbie said. “My mama says you look down on everybody and God will get you one day and put you into a lake of fire. My mama says you’re an atheist.”

“Actually, I’m a Methodist,” Catherine said. “But the real point here is that you can’t call me names, either. If you don’t like my ideas, then you have to argue about my ideas. And you have to be logical, and you have to use valid techniques of argumentation. This is a school, and in school you’ll behave like human beings.”

“I thought we weren’t human beings,” Barbie said. “I thought we were monkeys.”

Catherine looked away, out her window, and the first thing she saw was the new junior high school building, still barely half built. It made some kind of crazy sense that Franklin Hale and his people were opposed not only to the teaching of science but to the construction of new school facilities as well. They would leave that monstrosity sitting out there for decades. In the meantime, big bullies like Barbie McGuffie would chase younger girls around and call them “secular humanists.”

Catherine took a deep breath. “Detention,” she said. “After school every day for the next week. At the end of that time, I expect you both to apologize to Mallory Cornish in front of her entire home room class. Is that clear?”

“I’ve got nothing to apologize for,” Barbie said. “You’re trying to take away my free speech. She’s a snotty little snob and she’s going to burn in Hell forever.”

“If you don’t apologize, you’ll stay in detention, for as long as it takes. For the rest of the year, if you have to,” Catherine said.

“You can’t keep me in detention for the rest of the year,” Barbie said. “My mama is on the school board. She can fire you any time she wants to.”

“She can’t fire me at all, Barbie,” Catherine said. “I’ve got tenure. Go find out what that word means. And get out of my office. I never thought I’d live to see the day when my school would be plagued by—well, by what the two of you are. Only God knows who is going to burn in Hell forever. You shouldn’t second guess Him.”

“Yes, Miss Marbledale,” Susan said.

Barbie McGuffie snorted. “I know who’s going to burn in Hell forever,” she said. “Anybody with any sense knows.”

A second later, they were gone. Catherine stared for a moment at the empty doorway. Then she took a deep breath. She never realized how tense she was in these encounters until they were over, and then she felt as if she’d never get her muscles unkinked again.

She got up and went to her window and looked out. Annie-Vic was on her daily walk. Annie-Vic had been Catherine’s hero when she was growing up. There she was, a woman who had done it, a woman who had gotten out of Snow Hill and engaged in the life of the mind.

It was too cold to be standing at the window. The cold came through the thin panes of glass and made her joints ache. Catherine wondered if any of the people in this town understood what was going on with the children in the schools, what was happening in the girls’ rooms and boys’ rooms and lunchrooms and on the playgrounds. That was the very worst of this.

She went back to her desk and sat down. She looked at the lesson plan in front of her. In the space for “Purpose of This Lesson,” Marty Loudan had written “to demonstrate beyond doubt that evolution is a fact.”



8



Franklin Hale considered himself a sensible man, but he was really a man who believed that everyone on earth was trying to trick him. Well, maybe not everyone. Alice McGuffie wasn’t capable of it, and most of the old biddies who ran the Outreach Mission at the Baptist Church wouldn’t dare to try. No, it was people like Catherine Marbledale who were trying to trick him, and all the people like her, the ones who were about to be piling into town to turn this lawsuit into a freak show. On one level, Franklin didn’t blame them. This was a freak show. It was a bad joke. Everybody knew that the United States had been founded as a Christian nation, and that the Founding Fathers—with the maybe exception of Jefferson, who seemed to have been some kind of hippie in training all the way back in the days of the Revolutionary War—had wanted this country to stay true to the principles God gave it. That was why American law was based on the Bible, and why Americans took their oaths of office on the Bible, and said “so help me God” when they were through. Except for old Annie-Vic, of course, and Annie-Vic was, was—

Every time Franklin thought about Annie-Vic his head hurt, and then his sinuses started to get infected. If Franklin had believed in witches and devils—but he didn’t. Not every Christian went in for that kind of thing. Franklin thought Satan himself was enough evil for anybody—he’d have considered Annie-Vic to be dabbling in the dark arts. When she’d refused to swear on the Bible, and refused to say “so help me God,” he hadn’t even been surprised. When she’d brought out that copy of the Constitution and pointed to Article 6, and then to that one with the oath for the President, without a single mention of the Bible and without “so help me God,” he damned near plotzed. He’d spend the entire next day looking at other copies of the Constitution just to check, because he’d been sure she’d done something to the copy she had.